How to Read Financial Statements Part 1: Basic Profit & Loss

This is the first blog post in a three part series exploring financial statements. Cheryl Miki is the program manager at Artspace and heads the Arts Management Program.

So you’re at the board meeting of your favourite organization and the treasurer passes around a copy of the latest financial statements. Everyone gives them a respectable two minutes of silence, a few nods of the head, and then looks expectantly at the treasurer, hoping she will say everything is fine because no one wants to admit that they aren’t exactly sure what they are looking at.

It happens all the time. We aren’t taught about financial statements in school. We don’t need them to run our households. So where are we supposed to learn about these highly specialized documents?

Well, here, for starts.

In a standard set of financial statements, there are two main documents:

The Balance Sheet (also known at the Statement of Financial Position); and

The Profit & Loss Statement (a.k.a. the Income Statement).

Let’s start with the Profit & Loss Statement, because it is usually the easiest of the three to understand.

The Profit & Loss Statement (or P&L) tells you how much money you have earned (revenue) and how much it cost to earn it (expenses). The revenues are at the top and the expenses are at the bottom. If you’ve earned more money than you’ve spent, you have a profit. And if you’ve spent more than you’ve earned, you’ve got a loss. That’s pretty much it. Easy-peasy.

Here is a very basic example of a P&L:

These guys are in a profit position. If they had a loss, the bottom number would be in brackets.

But your board reports are a bit more complicated, right? They have lots more types of revenues and expenses and likely a few extra columns. We’ll tackle a more complex P&L in Part 2.

About this blog

This is where our trusty Artspace staff post tips, tricks and information for the arts community about building and managing exceptional arts organizations. The information we post is drawn from our experiences working in, and for, the arts over many years. We hope you find the information useful, and if you have a topic you’d like us to look into, let us know and we’ll tap our resources to find an answer.